Although technologies like Ruby, Hadoop, and Cloud Computing continue to dominate headlines, there are still a large number of businesses that rely on legacy technologies. Many businesses, particularly those operating in the banking and insurance sector, use solutions that are COBOL-based.

According to Reuters, over 220 billion lines of COBOL code are in use today. As a result, a tremendous amount of data remains tied up in legacy systems. For any legacy modernization and BI initiative to be successful, it is important that this data must be integrated, transformed, and offloaded onto an analytics platform.

While extracting data from COBOL-based legacy applications is essential for improved decision-making, it remains a challenge for most businesses due to two primary reasons:

Shortage of COBOL Skills

There is a growing gap between the number of skilled COBOL programmers and organizations relying on the programming language. The average age of COBOL programmers is 55 years, and 70 percent of universities are favoring fancy languages like Java, C++, Linux, and UNIX over COBOL.

Need for Custom Programming

Analyzing data by directly querying the mainframe is a complex process. It requires custom development and therefore can be time-consuming and costly, with billing based on MIPS.

To addresses these two challenges, businesses need a solution that can fuel their data integration efforts, while ensuring data quality and reducing the need for hand-coding the processes.

How Centerprise Facilitates COBOL Data Extraction

Centerprise is a complete data integration solution that allows users to import data from a variety of sources, including legacy systems, transform it and write it to a destination of their choice. With its user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface and unparalleled data mapping capabilities, Centerprise makes the process of extracting data from COBOL-based systems simple, quick, and cost-effective.

Centerprise offers complete support for COBOL data extraction with the functionality to:

Read a COBOL File — Centerprise features a high-speed COBOL file reader that can efficiently process large COBOL files.

Parse a Copybook — The built-in copybook parser reads a COBOL copybook and automatically builds the layout. When a copybook is not available, users can import a COBOL data file as a fixed length file and manually define field markers, data types, and numeric formats.

Identify USAGE, REDEFINES, and OCCURS — Centerprise offers support for different clauses used in a COBOL data file, including REDEFINES, OCCURS, and USAGE, such as COMP, COMP-3, COMP-5.

Once a COBOL data file has been imported, users can leverage the code-free, drag-and-drop environment of Centerprise to transform and write data to a destination of their choice.

Download our whitepaper to learn how Centerprise can help you combine legacy COBOL data with modern data streams and get a unified view of your information assets.